The atlases were developed under the guidance of the U.S. Co-chairman
of the Environmental Working Group, NOAA
Administrator D. James Baker, and the Russian Co-chairman,
Dr. V. I. Danilov-Danilyan, chairman of the State Committee for
Environmental Protection.

"The breadth and length of the records
provided by the Atlas are expected to be of particular value
to climate change studies," Baker said. "Since the
severe Arctic climate poses extreme risks and logistical hazards
to field crews, contemporary studies of arctic climate rely on
satellite remote sensing."

The new climate atlas provides nearly a
century of "ground truth" with which to calibrate and
gauge the validity of satellite measurements over later periods,
and the long-term perspective with which to identify permanent
changes from seasonal or cyclical shifts. In addition, regional
maps of air temperature, sea level pressure, precipitation, cloud
cover, snow depth, and global solar radiation supply the necessary
information for modeling exchange processes between sea ice,
atmosphere and ocean.

The CD-ROM Atlas includes historical and
new data ranging from observations taken from the 1893 voyage
of the Fram
to those collected from the T-3, a scientific research camp operated
from the1950s through the 1970s by the U.S.
Air Force on a floating ice island that drifted in the Beaufort
Gyre. In addition to summarizing the history of arctic exploration
from both Russian and U.S. vantage points, the Atlas includes
an article about native Inuit climate knowledge from a study
by University of Colorado
graduate student, Shari Fox.

Interviewing Inuit hunters, elders and
others living in the northern polar region, Fox reports that
the increasing incidence of rainfall in recent years sparked
the creation of a new Inuktitut word describing a mix of rain
and snow that denoted an increase in the amount of rain in winter,
"misullijuq."

Other highlights of the Atlas include a
description of the Russian North Pole drifting station program
and a monograph on weather hazards in the Russian Arctic, both
translated from the Russian, a photo gallery from early North
Pole stations, an arctic weather primer, and an English-Russian
glossary of meteorological terms.

The Arctic Council membership encompasses
representatives from Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway,
the Russian Federation, Sweden, the United States, the Association
of Indigenous Minorities of the North, Siberia and the Far East
of the Russian Federation, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference,
the Saami Council, and the Aleutian International Association.

The atlas is available from the National
Snow and Ice Data Center, Campus Box 449, University of Colorado,
Boulder, CO 80309. NSIDC also distributes other volumes in the
series. The National Snow and Ice Data Center is part of the
University of Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in
Environmental Sciences, and is affiliated with NOAA's
National Geophysical Data Center through a cooperative agreement.